How Preachers Incited Revolution
Harry S. Stout
"Angry colonists were rallied to declare independence and take up arms because of what they heard from the pulpit."
No turning back.
At the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775) Americans suffered 441 casualties and the British 1,150. Though a strategic victory for the British, English nerve was shaken, the colonists were emboldened, and any hope for peaceful reconciliation was lost.
It's 1775. The year 1787, with its novel constitution and separation of church and state is a long 12 years away. At the moment, you and your friends are just a bunch of outlaws.
You've heard the debates in Parliament over taxation and representation; you've seen British troops enforce royal supremacy at the point of a bayonet. Your king, George III, and Parliament have issued a declaration asserting their sovereignty in "all cases whatsoever" in the colonies. You are, at least in New England, a people under siege with British troops quartered in Boston. You've dumped tea into Boston's harbor in a fit of rage and had your port closed.
Who will you turn to now for direction? There are no presidents or vice-presidents, no supreme court justices or public defenders to call on. There are a handful of young, radical lawyers, like the Adams cousins, John and Samuel, but they're largely concentrated in cities, while you and most of your friends live in the country. In many colonies, including Massachusetts, there are not even elected governors or councilors--they have all been appointed by the British crown and are answerable to it.
Where you turn is where you have habitually turned for over a century: to the prophets of your society, your ministers.
The American Revolutionary era is known as the "Golden Age of Oratory." What school child has not heard or read Patrick Henry's immortal words, "Give me liberty or give me death"? Who has not seen reenactments or heard summaries of Ben Franklin's heroic appearance before a hostile British Parliament?
Yet often lost in this celebration of patriotic oratory is the key role preaching played in the Revolutionary movement.
TV, INTERNET AND MORE
A few broad statistics can help us appreciate more fully the unique power the sermon wielded in Revolutionary America.
Over the span of the colonial era, American ministers delivered approximately 8 million sermons, each lasting one to one-and-a-half hours. The average 70-year-old colonial churchgoer would have listened to some 7,000 sermons in his or her lifetime, totaling nearly 10,000 hours of concentrated listening. This is the number of classroom hours it would take to receive ten separate undergraduate degrees in a modern university, without ever repeating the same course!
The pulpits were Congregational and Baptist in New England; Presbyterian, Lutheran, and German Reformed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; and Anglican and Methodist in the South. But no matter the denomination, colonial congregations heard sermons more than any other form of oratory. The colonial sermon was prophet, newspaper, video, Internet, community college, and social therapist all wrapped in one. Such was the range of its influence on all aspects of life that even contemporary television and personal computers pale in comparison.
Eighteenth-century America was a deeply religious culture that lived self-consciously “under the cope of heaven.” In Sunday worship, and weekday (or “occasional”) sermons, ministers drew the populace into a rhetorical world that was more compelling and immediate than the physical settlements surrounding them. Sermons taught not only the way to personal salvation in Christ but also the way to temporal and national prosperity for God’s chosen people.
Events were perceived not from the mundane, human vantage point but from God’s. The vast majority of colonists were Reformed or Calvinist, to whom things were not as they might appear at ground level: all events, no matter how mundane or seemingly random, were parts of a larger pattern of meaning, part of God’s providential design. The outlines of this pattern were contained in Scripture and interpreted by discerning pastors. Colonial congregations saw themselves as the “New Israel,” endowed with a sacred mission that destined them as lead actors in the last triumphant chapter in redemption history.
Thus colonial audiences learned to perceive themselves not as a ragtag settlement of religious exiles and eccentrics but as God’s special people, planted in the American wilderness to bring light to the Old World left behind. Europeans might ignore or revile them as “fanatics,” but through the sermon, they knew better. Better to absorb the barbs of English ridicule than to forget their glorious commission.
For over a century, colonial congregations had turned to England for protection and culture. Despite religious differences separating many colonists from the Church of England, they shared a common identity as Englishmen, an identity that stood firm against all foes. But almost overnight, these loyalties were challenged by a series of British imperial laws. Beginning with the Stamp Act of 1765 and running through the “Boston Massacre” of 1770, the Tea Act of 1773, and finally, martial law in Massachusetts, patriotic Americans perceived a British plot to deprive them of their fundamental English rights and their God-ordained liberties.
In the twentieth-century, taxation and representation are political and constitutional issues, having nothing to do with religion. But to eighteenth-century ears, attuned to lifetimes of preaching, the issues were inevitably religious as well, so colonists naturally turned to their ministers to learn God’s will about these troubling matters.
TYRANNY IS “IDOLATRY”
When understood in its own times, the American Revolution was first and foremost a religious event. This is especially true in New England, where the first blood was shed.
By 1775 the ranks of Harvard- and Yale-educated clergymen swelled to over600 ministers, distributed throughout every town and village in New England. Clergymen surveyed the events swirling around them; by 1775 liberals and evangelicals, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, men and women—all saw in British actions grounds for armed resistance.
In fact, not only was it right for colonists to resist British “tyranny,” it would actually be sinful not to pick up guns.
How did they come to this conclusion? They fastened on two arguments.
First, they focused on Parliament’s 1766 Declaratory Act, which stated that Parliament had sovereignty over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” For clergymen this phrase took on the air of blasphemy. These were fighting words not only because they violated principles of representative government but even more because they violated the logic of sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”) and God’s exclusive claim to sovereignty “in all cases whatsoever.”
From the first colonial settlements, Americans—especially New England Americans—were accustomed to constraining all power and granting absolute authority to no mere human being.
For Reformed colonists, these ideas were tied up with their historic, covenant theology. At stake was the preservation of their identity as a covenant people. Not only did Parliament’s claims represent tyranny, they also represented idolatry. For colonists to honor those claims would be tantamount to forsaking God and abdicating their national covenant pledge to “have no other gods” before them.
In a classic sermon on the subject of resistance entitled A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, Boston’s Jonathan Mayhew, a liberal(he favored Unitarianism), took as his text Romans 13:1-6, in which Paul enjoins Christians to “be subject unto the higher powers.” The day he picked for this sermon was portentous—it came on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, when Anglican ministers routinely abhorred the Puritan revolution, and Puritans routinely kept silent. Mayhew would not keep silent.
For centuries, rulers had used this text to discourage resistance and riot. But circumstances had changed, and in the chilling climate of impending Anglo-American conflict, Mayhew asked if there were any limits to this law? He concluded that the law is binding only insofar as government honors its “moral and religious” obligations. When government fails to honor that obligation, or contract, then the duty of submission is likewise nullified. Submission, in other words, is not unlimited.
Rulers, he said, “have no authority from God to do mischief. … It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors God’s ministers.” Far from being sinful, resistance to corrupt ministers and tyrannical rulers is a divine imperative. The greater sin lies in passively sacrificing the covenant for tyranny, that is, in failing to resist.
Who determines whether government is “moral and religious”? In the Revolutionary era, the answer was simple: the individual. There were no established institutions that would support violent revolution. Ultimate justification resided in the will of a people acting self-consciously as united individuals joined in a common cause. Where a government was found to be deficient in moral and spiritual terms, the individual conscience was freed to resist.
AMERICA: A NEW HEAVEN
Clergy in the Revolutionary era reminded people not only what they were fighting against, namely tyranny and idolatry, but also what they were fighting for: a new heaven and a new earth.
Many early American settlers arrived believing they were part of the New Israel, that they would be instruments for Christ’s triumphant return to earth. Interpretations varied on whether the last days would be marked by progressive revelations and triumphs (the “postmillennial” view), or whether they would be marked by sudden judgments and calamities (the “pre millennial” view), or some combination thereof. But all agreed the present was portentous, and American colonists were going to play a direct role in the great things looming.
Read the entire article: https://americanspiritualheritage.wo...obed-regiment/
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